Defining "Winning"

There are many reasons to do your absolute best to finish first and being driven to do so is a very admirable quality, but I would suggest that there is more to VEX Robotics than where you rank at the end of the day. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not about to spew a whole "everyone is a winner!" speech. However, I think for a lot of people, a better definition of winning isn't coming first or winning an award. I try and tell teams I mentor the reality that one day, they will move on from VEX and it is pretty unlikely that the fact that they one this tournament isn't going to be a big deal. So, what you do take away from this program are the experiences that you have, the people that you meet / relationships you make and most importantly, the things that you learn. I've said to several teams in the past, "did you learn anything?" More often than not, the answer is "Yes!" and they can walk away better than they started.

From personal experience, in Gateway my team (AURA) got all the way to the final match, only to fall short because one doubler barrel would not stay scored. We were pretty annoyed about that at the time, but since then we have learned from that experience and we are a much better team now than we were. In time, the outcome of that match will not matter as much as the amazing time I had on that trip with my teammates.

However, I feel that this is only one side of the equation, because, that story about Gateway happened two years ago now. Despite that fantastic experience, we've moved on and asked "what's next?" For a while, that was getting back to worlds and winning the final game of the tournament, but over time that has become less important to us, rather we have improved our mentoring program, developed awesome vision software and taken a lead role in tournament organization, all with the goal of forging our own path. This doesn't mean that we have forgotten about winning the world championships, I'd like to think that some day we'll go back and finally knock that bastard off, but we still recognize all of the great things we have done on the way. I got told an interesting story the other day of this years New Zealand Excellence award winner (5606 - Fielding High School). They had an incident where one of the strongest Auckland region teams played in a local scrimmage and 5606 were beaten resoundingly, to the point where a lot of their members were demoralized and didn't want to continue competing anymore. To their credit, they built themselves back up, regained the confidence and worked hard to develop their region. They were awarded the New Zealand Excellence award and are on their way to the 2014 World Championships in Anaheim, California.

 Matt  

Hello, World

Hi everyone. I haven't been very productive today so I decided I would make a blog. Yay! This isn't going to be a preach my message to the world kinda of affair, rather just a place to write down some of the many thoughts I have every day pertaining to the VEX robotics competition, especially in New Zealand.

My thoughts today are around this forum post by Foster on the official VEX forums. He talks about wanting competition downtime (between matches) to give teams time to repair or modify their robots / change strategy. However, I have several thoughts on this notion, which I will explain below:

1. Deadlines are a good thing: Many people, including myself, have a hard time getting projects finished or work done without a deadline looming. There are people in the world who will not move on until they feel that they are finished with their current project, but this simply isn't everyone. Furthermore, I feel that teams need to be in the mindset that when they turn up to a scrimmage they are there to play matches, not build their robot. I agree with the mindset that every match is a learning experience, but I think that the under pressure environment of having to make repairs or adjustments with limited time available is a good test to be under when competing. Time, people and resource management are very sort after skills, the VEX Robotics competition does an excellent job of fostering them in its participants.
2. Getting solutions right the first time is a desirable skill also. Although I believe that failure is too demonized in today's society, creating a "due date" gives a certain incentive to add serious consideration to (in the case of the VRC) design decisions, tactics and so forth. If you simply let a team take a mulligan after every failure, there will be no decision to apply serious though to the decisions they are making in preparation. Far too often, I see teams not think about WHY they are doing something, but just "following the trend", so to speak. This is one of the key areas I would like to work on going forward and I am sure I will be writing about it later on. We need to encourage teams to think for themselves and we do that by setting deadlines.
3. Finally, on more of a technical matter, more data is better. In large tournaments, there are already issues of teams on competing against a small fraction of the teams involved and decreasing that fraction will only serve to exacerbate this issue. With the current tournament structure, we want to promote playing as many matches as possible - for two reasons. The first is to aid in removing variance from the qualifying stages. I will conceded that in the tournaments where a lot is on the line (i.e. the World Championships) the time for design is mostly over, so I don't think anyone is advocating more downtime then. The larger point however is teams need match experience to metric their designs. If only a few matches are played, the probability that a team encounters unusually difficult opposition, or their design doesn't fully execute without issue is higher. This may lead teams to give up on genuine ideas because of a few bad experiences. Trying to "make it work" provides a better picture as to whether it will or not.

In all, my opinion is show up to play and if things go wrong, make the best with what you have. You'll learn better because of it.